With the technical enhancements in this digital era, everything is now based on peripheral devices like smartphones, laptops, and tablets. All these have become possible, only because of the mobile app developers. They have crafted mobile apps, that fulfill different purposes for both individuals and business organizations. Since mobile has taken over most of the things that users are performing on a daily basis. Mobile app development is also a vast terminology that consists of different platforms and app development frameworks. The most popular app development platforms these days are Android and iOS. Both these platforms have a wide range of users.
This is the main reason why businesses have to target the users that are using both these platforms. For which they have to incur a lot of funds, crafting their desired apps separately for each one. But now technology has made it a much easier, hassle-free, and cost-saving process for business. All thanks to cross-platform mobile app development services. With this companies can easily craft mobile apps with a single code base for multiple platforms saving time and resources.
These cross-platform mobile app development frameworks provide users with efficient and budget-friendly app development opportunities. These opportunities provide you with the pathways to make your product and services reach a wide range of audiences using a single codebase. These platforms are proven to be highly beneficial and efficient for the users. In this blog, we will be discussing several aspects of how cross-platform app development makes your business’s mobile app reach a wider audience without putting a lot of effort into creating mobile apps for multiple platforms.
According to a detailed research report that is completed by a well-renowned research platform “Statcounter GlobalStats” which clearly provides the details about the leading platforms for which the mobile apps are crafted. With this platform, we have got the information that Android is one of the leading platforms that holds the majority of shares in the market approximately 72.2%. The second top majority shareholder is iOS which holds approximately 27% of market shares. The minor shareholders here are the two companies first one is Samsung, which holds around 0.34% of the market share, and KaiOS which holds 0.13% of the market share.
Source: Statcounter
Cross-platform or multi-platform app development is considered one of the most prominent and efficient mobile app development strategies. This multi-platform app development approach allows the app developers to just write a single form of code for both platforms. The same code can be reused for creating mobile apps for different platforms. When you are using any of the cross-platform app development approaches then there is no need to worry about the quality of the apps. The same codebase helps businesses craft the app that has the most efficient functionalities, providing the users with a seamless user experience.
Using these platforms one can easily tailor the application for multiple platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and other web app development platforms. There is no need to make any sort of changes to the code for crafting the apps for another platform. These platforms are enhancing the app development process, and improvising the traditional app development methodology. Saving both the time and money.
The main aim of cross-platform app development is to save time, effort, and resources, incurred by businesses. Thus reducing the need to maintain and manage multiple codebases. Instead, developers can focus on a single codebase that can be used across different platforms, which ultimately leads to faster development cycles, lower development costs, and the enhanced ability to reach a wider audience more efficiently. This will also optimize the working efficiency of the developers, thus crafting high-end mobile apps for businesses.
There are several cross-platform frameworks available in the market, out of which some of the major ones are, React-native, Flutter, Xamarin, and PhoneGap. All these platforms have made faster app development for multiple platforms possible. Using all these applications you can craft robust mobile or web applications as per your desired requirements for multiple platforms. It allows faster app development saving the time of your business.
Read more: Beyond Downloads: Strategies for Enhancing Mobile App User Retention
1. Cost-Efficiency:
Developing and maintaining separate native applications for different platforms can be costly. Cross-platform development minimizes these expenses by allowing code reusability. This reusability of code helps cross-platform app developers to create mobile apps without making any sort of changes in the codebase.
2. Time Savings:
With a single codebase, development time is significantly reduced. Changes and updates can be implemented once and then propagated across all platforms, eliminating duplicate work. Single codebase reduces the efforts of the developers resulting in saving their development time with increased accuracy.
3. Consistency:
Cross-platform development ensures a consistent user experience across various platforms. Users on iOS, Android, and other platforms encounter a uniform interface and functionality. The cross-platform development enhances the consistency of the developers, enabling them to just focus on a single form of code.
4. Wider Audience Reach:
Simultaneously targeting multiple platforms enables you to reach a broader audience. This is especially crucial if your product or service needs to cater to users across different devices and operating systems thus enabling your business app to reach the audiences that belong to different platforms.
5. Enhanced User Experience:
Cross-platform app development is one such platform that delivers you with mobile app development services using a single code base. Without compromising the user experience. It also delivers immersive user experiences to users no matter, which platform they are using for accessing the application.
6. Simplified Maintenance:
Managing a single codebase is more straightforward than juggling multiple ones. Bug fixes, updates, and feature additions become more efficient and less error-prone. Since it is a single framework you can easily update or upgrade your mobile app solutions using a single framework. No need to maintain and update it separately.
7. Faster Time-to-Market:
Quicker development cycles and streamlined maintenance processes translate into faster product launches, giving you a competitive edge. It provides you with a faster development process, saving both the time and effort of the developers. So there is no need to hire iOS app developers and Android app developers separately
1. React Native:
This is a platform that is introduced by Facebook. It is likewise widely known for mobile app development for iOS and Android platforms based on JavaScript. Its precise capability and enormous developer network make it the first choice for most mobile app development initiatives. It has quite a number of superior features and functionality, enabling developers to create high-quality, and engaging mobile applications for both systems.
2. Flutter:
Google’s open-source UI toolkit, Flutter, facilitates the advent of natively compiled programs for cellular, internet, and computing devices using a single codebase. It makes use of the Dart programming language and offers a rich array of customizable widgets and functions. This dart language is less difficult, presenting its users with a considerable learning curve. Thus it permits the improvement of the most efficient and feature-rich apps without lowering the quality and reducing the efforts of the developers.
3. Xamarin:
A framework Owned by Microsoft, Xamarin is based on C# and .NET principles to enable the advent of native mobile apps for iOS and Android at the same time using a single and efficient codebase for both platforms. Xamarin is one such platform that has a vast array of capabilities that help users in crafting the top-end mobile apps.
4. Electron:
It is an open-source framework for building multi-platform desktop programs using internet technology like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is equipped with a wide range of robust features and functionalities with the most famous packages like Slack, Visual Studio Code, and WhatsApp Desktop.
5. Apache Cordova (PhoneGap):
Cordova serves as a platform for crafting the local mobile applications with the usage of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It establishes a bridge between web code and local device capability, making it feasible to target more than one platform with a single codebase.
6. Unity:
This framework is on the other hand is known for game development, and can also be employed to craft interactive 2D and 3D packages. Its versatility extends past gaming to non-gaming packages as well. Providing the best usage experiences to the users, crafting the most apparent gaming mobile apps for multiple platforms.
Read more: Reasons Why Your Mobile App Needs Maintenance & Support?
1. Planning & Strategizing:
You must start your project by planning with cross-platform compatibility keeping in mind all your business’s requirements. Ensuring your user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design can seamlessly adapt to diverse screen sizes, resolutions, and input methods providing the users with complete responsiveness and delivering them with a seamless user experience.
After you have planned and strategized the next step includes the selection of a cross-platform mobile app development platform. To choose the best suitable framework for your mobile app you should go for the mobile app consultancy services. These services provide you with the best possible frameworks as per your business’s requirements.
3. Prototyping & Wireframing:
When you have finalized the platform you should create a prototype of your mobile application. This prototype provides you with an idea about how your mobile app will look like and how it will function when created. It also provides you basic ideology about the features and functionalities that are lacking so you can add these features to it.
4. UI/UX Design:
After the platform is chosen you should start, designing the user interface for your mobile applications. It should be responsive enough to adapt to the different screen sizes for different devices. Providing the users with easy navigation smooth functioning and efficient user experience.
It is the next step after the UI/UX design process. When you have created a design layout for your mobile apps the mobile app developers start creating the mobile app using the particular codebase of your opted framework. The code to implement the functionalities, making them work with efficiency.
6. Testing:
After they have completed the coding process for the application, the testing phase is started. This phase involves module-based testing to find different errors, exceptions, and usability issues in the applications. After the errors are detected by the testors they forward those to the developers for correction and improvisation. Ensuring the proper, efficient and smooth functioning of the mobile applications.
7. Implementation:
After all the errors are solved the application is again tested and finalized. After it is finalized and approved with all the checks. The process further moves to implementing the application. Adding these applications to their sources like the Play Store for Android and App Store for iOS. For which the users have to follow certain criteria that state that their application might meet certain regulatory standards. When your application meets all the regulations then it can be submitted to the respective store. Which will take around 7-15 days for the launch.
Conclusion
Cross-platform is a platform that is specially designed to provide users with the functionality to develop application software that is compatible with different platforms. These platforms consist of robust features and functionalities that help the business create their desired IT solutions at affordable prices, saving their time and effort. There are several cross-platform app development frameworks like React Native, PhoneGap, Xamarin, Visual Studio, and many others. In this blog, we have studied about how cross-platform is beneficial for enhancing your business’s reach with different types of Cross-Platform frameworks and a full-fledged cross-platform app development process.
Amplework, a well-known mobile app development company, provides you with cross-platform app development services over various frameworks. With a team of experienced mobile app developers, we believe in perfection, crafting your idea into a feature-rich mobile app. So if you are looking to create the best and business-oriented mobile app then you can hire dedicated iOS developers and Android developers with us or you can choose cross-platform mobile app development services with us.
